The Mother Load

Do you know how to tell if you have an unhealthy relationship with cheese? If you're willing to do this to get some:



Yes, that's a person being taken away on a stretcher after a trip down that hill.  He got no cheese.

I heard about this story on the radio today.  The Gloucestershire cheese-rolling event is a tradition in which marginally sane individuals hurl themselves down a crazy steep hill in hopes of winning a wheel of cheese that has been hurled down the hill ahead of them.  Only one person gets the cheese.  The rest just get concussions.  (Bonus if the cheese winner gets the cheese AND a concussion.)

Sadly, the event has become so popular (Hey guys! We're loonies!  We like cheese!  Let's go to England and break our necks!) that this year's cheese rolling has been cancelled by the authorities who fear the increasing numbers of cheese chasers will cause safety problems.  They just don't have enough ambulances to go around, and even if they did, they can't get the ambulances to the hospital with all those bodies strewn everywhere.

Aw, man!  They always get rid of stuff the year I was going to do it!

You've got to hand it to the British.  They happily participate in 300 years of people throwing themselves off a cliff for a wheel of cheese, and just when the rest of the world realizes how fun it really is to snap half the bones in their bodies, they up and cancel it.

All is not lost (unless you're that guy on the stretcher).  The powers that be who oppose the anti-cheese-rolling powers that be are working on a solution that will allow the event to happen despite the safety concerns.  They're kind of hush-hush in the article, but they do say they're planning to call a meeting.  That's right.  I said meeting.  Aw, snap!

You know...if they made their opponents race to the bottom of that hill in order to speak at the meeting, they wouldn't have any problem getting their cheese-rolling back.